HENRY DAVID THOREAU Quotes

One farmer says to me, You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make the bones with; and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying himself with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle

Henry David Thoreau

The question is not what you look at, but what you see

Henry David Thoreau

Water is the only drink for a wise man.

Henry David Thoreau

I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man.

Henry David Thoreau

When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable, and to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place - a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow of Nature.

Henry David Thoreau

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colours, or the heavens without their azure.

Henry David Thoreau

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

Henry David Thoreau

We can never have enough of nature.

Henry David Thoreau

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

Henry David Thoreau

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

Henry David Thoreau

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

Henry David Thoreau

If one advances confidently in the direction of one's dreams, and endeavors to live the life which one has imagined, one will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

Henry David Thoreau

Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.

Henry David Thoreau

As for doing good; that is one of the professions which is full. Moreover I have tried it fairly and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.